London Welsh

No, not the rugby club of that name playing in Oxford - although I'm sure I'll write something when the RFU get their act together and publish their findings from the recent disciplinary hearing....

This morning I had to go up to London for a meeting.  Just occasionally, despite my better judgment, it's unavoidable.  The train back to Oxford was delayed, and while I was hanging aroungd on the Lawn at Paddington station I was slightly surprised to see the distinctive form of a Festiniog Railway locomotive on platform 9.  Princess, identical twin to Prince - Britain's oldest working steam engine in regular traffic - and built at George England's Hatcham Ironworks in 1863.  The Festiniog had 5, all to the same basic design:

Prince and Palmerston are still in service, Little Giant was cut up in the early 20th century, and Welsh Pony used to stand in the middle of a flowerbed in Porthmadog - I fell off it multiple times between the ages of 8 and 13....  I believe Welsh Pony has now been rescued and is being cosmetically restored for a slightly more dignified fate.

The last time I saw Princess was on display in the Station restaurant in Porthmadog in about 1990 - she's been rescued from there and tarted up a bit for the 150th anniversary of the Festiniog Railway (and her own 150th birthday this year).  If you happen to find yourself at a loose end in Paddington, she's there until 6 weeks after St David's Day.

Back to the subject of spatial strategy (do try and stay awake...), or the coming sacrifice of Meriden on the altar of new city building

Interesting article in the MoS today (which must nearly be an oxymoron) about government plans to put 100,000 houses in the increasingly narrow gap between Birmingham and Coventry.  Is there any common sense left in the world.  The same article, in what we must hope is just typical Mail outrage/spin, suggests the rebranding of Birmingham International Airport to, wait for it, Birmingham London Airport....  You know those occasions when you truly think you are living in the end of days?

Actually there is some method in the airport madness, in as much as assuming HS2 gets built then it will be quicker to get into London from Birmingham airport than it is from Stanstead.  That having been said, it doesn't do much for the sense of Birmingham as a city in its own right, rather than some form of extremely northern dormitory suburb of the great metropolis - rather like a super-sized version of Acton...

The problem is that this answers part of the demand for expansion of the national housing stock, without really addressing what it is that all these new Brummies are going to do when they get there (other than commute to London).  The idea of a forty mile continuous urban sprawl from the rust belt of the Black Country through to Coventry is something that really ought to make people stop and think about what it is that they want from where they live.  I know the relaxation of the planning laws is going to create a presumption in favour of new development, but at what cost to the domestic environment, and the sanity of the inhabitants?

I'm going to write something in the next couple of days about the coming referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor, but it would be interesting to see where the putative contenders stand on the idea of annexing Coventry as a flagship policy....  Not quite local democracy all this, is it?

Sleeping your way to a Meeting

Recently, the sleeper service between London and points Scottish has come under the threat of having its funding withdrawn.  Whilst this lunacy seems to be diminishing after a rare outbreak of common sense, perhaps now’s a good time to consider why these services are so vital to the wellbeing of their users.

The first thing to say is that I’m not rampantly anti-aviation. I think it would be a good thing if we all took fewer, and shorter flights, but there are times when obviously only the plane will do.  In the UK we have the real advantage that nowhere is really all that far from anywhere else.  Admittedly, if you live in Truro and get asked to a forty minute business meeting in Inverness then you should probably think twice about whether a conference call might not be a better idea; but there is generally no need to be leaping on the plane for an internal flight every couple of days. 

A couple of years ago I was travelling regularly from London to Edinburgh on business, and you got to recognise the same faces standing in the queue for security at 0630 on a Monday morning.  I just couldn’t understand how people could keep up this existence for any length of time.  Of course, I realise that some people make calculations based on needing to do it – in order to see more of their children and have a workable home life - but it did seem to me that this sort of extreme commuting meant serious compromises in other areas of life, and high levels of stress and exhaustion.

After a while I investigated the possibility of taking the sleeper instead of the plane – I’m generally pretty positive about rail travel anyway, and it seemed to have been the right solution for Richard Hanney….

Quite simply, it was a revelation.  Yes it takes longer – London to Scotland and back in 30 odd hours instead of say 14, but it opens up time for much better use than standing in queues or waiting for the transfer bus to a far distant airport car park.

Given my general antipathy to London, the sleeper at least gives me the opportunity to go and have dinner with those of my friends who haven’t yet managed to escape!  From the restaurant or bar a quick tube to Euston sees me on the train and in bed by midnight, before being lulled to sleep by the motion of the train as it makes its way out through the northern suburbs and onto the West Coast mainline.

The berths are spartan but comfortable, and if you know the dates you want to travel a decent time in advance then you can usually get a cabin to yourself for about the same price as a business internal flight.  When you wake up it’s to the sight of the Pentland Hills rolling past the window, and you’re into Edinburgh in time for a shower, breakfast, and a read of the paper before your nine am meeting.  You’re less stressed, better rested, and arguably better able to perform.  That night, simply repeat the process with your Edinburgh based friends….

Of course, this sort of thing is made a lot easier if you’re single, and don’t have a partner or family who may be less enthusiastic about you spending more time away than you technically have to, but, if you can get away with it, then it really is the only way to travel.

 If the sleeper service was withdrawn tomorrow then the world would still keep turning, and most people would carry on without batting an eyelid, but something that makes Britain ever so slightly more civilised would have vanished; in the long run that would make us all the poorer.

London

London.  Sooner or later we were always going to have to talk about London, that teeming agglomeration of places you wouldn’t want to live that casts its baleful eye over the rest of the country and looks for fresh prey.  It started with Middlesex, most beautiful and unassuming of counties, despoiled beyond recognition – what price Betjeman’s “rural Rayner’s Lane” now? – and then began work on the people and places further afield, sucking talent and opportunity away from the rest of the country in its insatiable lust for commerce.

Of course, there are nicer parts, Wimbledon is generally lovely; Soho has a mystique all its own; but for every place you’d want to live there’re two where you’d only exist.  Most of west London, for example, for which the best that can be said is that the house prices aren’t as bad as Fulham; or Angel/Islington, that weird combination of Guardian reading public school luvvies and Telegraph reading public school lawyers and city types – not that you could put a cigarette paper between them.  Or Stoke Newington: about as “edgy” these days as Bloomsbury was in the 1890s.

London has always been a graveyard of hopes and dreams, but this has occasionally led to great art – as poverty, in a clichéd fashion, sometimes does.  Patrick Hamilton has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, his chronicles of lower middle and upper working class London life in the interwar period (most notably “Hangover Square” or the trilogy “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky”) perhaps chiming with the uncertainties and economic hardships of our own time. 

Hamilton, of course, was an uneven writer – his star burned brightly enough to begin with, and reached its zenith with “The Slaves of Solitude,” before beginning the long slide into mediocrity with the Gorse trilogy (the last volume of which, “Unknown Assailant,” is probably only worth reading for the sake of completeness; the reader is long past caring about the story or the character).

Then there’s Julian Maclaren-Ross. You’ve probably come across Maclaren-Ross, even if you haven’t realised it. He was the template for the self destructing idiot writer; a prototype for the sort of chap (other than himself) that Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote “Enemies of Promise.” He was also the model for X Trapnel, far and away the most intriguing character in Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” If you haven’t read this sequence, then go and do so immediately – for Trapnel’s appearances you want volumes 10, 11, and 12, respectively – or, for the York Notes crib, just watch Sean Baker’s brilliant portrayal in the Channel 4 adaptation from the late 1990s.

JM-R was, in truth, a bit of an oddball.  A somewhat peripatetic childhood in France, and broken schooling, eventually saw him washed up in pre-war London.  He didn’t really trouble the literary world over much until towards the end of the Second World War when, managing to extricate himself from the army, who were probably as glad to see the back of him as he was then, he became a fixture of the Soho scene.  Reading his excellent “Memoirs of the Forties” is like having a front row seat in a parade of mid 20^th century British greats.  Waugh is there, as is Betjeman (both of whom were admirers of his prose), Orwell, Tambimuttu, Connolly and Horizon magazine….

Maclaren-Ross completed only one “literary” novel (as opposed to some dreadful penny shockers), 1947’s “Of Love and Hunger,” but this alone would be enough to see him occupying a creditable place in the English novelist’s second XI.  I’ll be honest that it probably doesn’t sound totally promising when I say it’s about a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman in 1930s Brighton, but it speaks eloquently of lost love, drudgery, hardship and heartbreak. Much as with Waugh, the bad end unhappily and the good even more so, but it is crystal clear prose that you can lose yourself in.  Possibly the only comparable prose stylist working today is Edward St Aubyn.

The chief glory of the JM-R oeuvre, however, is the short stories.  You can still pick up first and second editions reasonably cheaply, but they have been collected into a couple of volumes that are easily available on Amazon, notably “Selected Stories” and “Bitten by the Tarantula.” These demonstrate Maclaren-Ross’ pitch perfect ear for dialogue, particularly the army stories, which limn with devastating accuracy the predicament of the over intellectual under achiever conscripted into the machine of total war. Then there’re the peppery ex colonials, the young men on the make, and a cast of grotesque suburbanites and central London bohemians.  He was on to a good thing and, during the war when there was a hunger for reading material of all types, literary magazines were booming in the publishing mainstream, and the short story was enjoying its last hurrah as an artistic form, he made absolute hay.

Maclaren-Ross was however afflicted with Sohoitis in a big way – Tambimuttu’s term for spending all one’s time in the pubs of Soho and never getting any work done. He spent periods of time sleeping rough, suffered psychotic episodes (in the grip of one of which he stalked and plotted to murder George Orwell’s widow Sonia), and died much too young in the 1960s. Paul Willetts did an excellent job of bringing him back to life in his 2005 biography “Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia,” which is heartily recommended. 

I thought about Maclaren-Ross as I sat in the bar of the Fitzroy Tavern the other week.  Sam Smiths have managed to keep the place looking appropriately unmodernised, and it was easy to imagine the man in the dark glasses and the teddy bear overcoat, wielding his swordstick and knocking back the  drinks as he kept the hordes of hangers on entertained before going home to get on the Benzedrine and write until dawn in his miniscule handwriting.  Essays, reviews, short stories, parodies, begging letters to the Royal Literary Fund….  For a short time London came alive again, and its depressing descent into plastic consumerism was arrested.  The provinces have had their literary hymners too, Priestley say, or Francis Brett-Young.  But it is perhaps appropriate that the chronicler of 20^th century London should have been so heroically underachieving.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, then, in the words of Paul Willetts “a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.”